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Yesterday the backbench Tory behind the study, Claire Perry, demanded that internet providers offer parents a simple way of filtering out adult content.

Even very young children can accidentally stumble across pornography, the report for the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection said.

Warped: There are fears readily available internet pornography could damage teenagers' ability to maintain normal relationships

Last night Miranda Suit, founder of
campaign group Safermedia, told the inquiry: ‘This generation is going
through an experiment. No one knows how they will survive this
unprecedented assault on their sexual development. They are guinea pigs
for the next generation.’

David Cameron told MPs yesterday that he had called technology firms together to offer a ‘choice of blocking all adult and age-restricted content on their home internet’.

But the Prime Minister has been left frustrated by the unwillingness of the major internet service providers to force new customers to ‘opt in’ to adult content as opposed to the current system of ‘opting out’ by installing their own filters.

Miss Perry’s report also revealed that the privately run Portland Clinic in London reported that 26 per cent of young people coming to it for psychological treatment were hooked on internet porn.

And Tory MP Andrea Leadsom revealed that her own son had told her that ‘handing around very hardcore porn on memory sticks is absolutely rife at his school’. The mother of three fears regulators are ignorant about the availability of porn through internet-ready TVs, calling the internet a modern-day ‘Wild West’.

Over 60 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds
have internet access in their own rooms, compared with 30 per cent six
years before. Alarmingly, 41 per cent of seven to ten-year-olds can
access the internet from their own rooms, more than a fourfold increase
on previous figures.

Appalled: Backbencher Claire Perry (left) was behind the report, while fellow Tory MP Andrea Leadsom (right) said porn swapping was rife at her son's school

The report suggested 12 per cent of young teenagers were involved in sharing intimate images of themselves, which were often circulated around the class when a relationship broke up.

One child abuse counsellor told how victims were desensitised with sexually explicit images by their ‘groomers’.

Tink Palmer, of the Marie Collins Foundation, said porn could be ‘a vehicle for perpetrators who wish to harm children online to encourage them to enter into that sort of fantasy and then often meet them offline.’

She said well over half of young women victims of grooming and abuse she encountered were from ‘middle-class’ families living in ‘very comfortable’ homes.

One recent study found that children from the middle classes were more likely to have access to internet porn.